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John Kerry’s Phony Climate War

By RICH LOWRY

February 19, 2014

Secretary of State John Kerry is reporting for duty in the war against climate change. In a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, he declared climate change “another weapon of mass destruction.” Indeed, in what might be news to the 50-megaton hydrogen bomb, he declared it “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

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If climate change does not consider itself duly warned, it has only itself to blame. John Kerry has proven himself fully capable of supporting hostilities against dangerous enemies of the United States (that he then regrets, and campaigns against—but that’s another story).

The Obama administration’s latest foray on climate change—clearly setting the predicate for a regulatory offensive on the issue—is notable for its cheap argumentation heedless of logic or the actual state of the evidence. The same people who congratulate themselves for taking climate science so seriously trample all over the science as a matter of routine.

On climate change, they can’t handle the truth, because it is too nuanced and complicated to support a scare-mongering push for expensive, economically harmful action right away.

Nothing so annoys the alarmists about climate change née global warming as when conservatives talk as if a cold snap or snowstorm falsifies the phenomenon. Weather, they explain, rolling their eyes, isn’t climate. You dummies.

Or that used to be the mantra. Now, every bit of spectacular weather is presumed to be part of the grand, threatening mosaic of climate change.

“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science,” President Obama intoned in his second inaugural, “but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

“This isn’t something around the corner,” Kerry said in his WMD speech. “This is happening now.” He cited California, “where millions of people are now experiencing the 13th month of the worst drought the state has seen in 500 years.”

This sounds dire and about what you would expect of a weapon of mass destruction. But scientists aren’t so quick to point their fingers at climate change. “I’m pretty sure the severity of this thing is due to natural variability,” climate scientist Richard Seager told the New York Times, that famous denialist rag.

California experienced a very similar drought in the late 1970s. That event had the same proximate cause as this one, a ridge of high pressure that sat off the California coast and diverted storms to the north. This isn’t climate change so much as climate redux. The more the climate changes, apparently, the more it stays the same.

Obama administration “science czar” John Holdren explained in a briefing, “Scientifically, no single episode of extreme weather, no storm, no flood, no drought can be said to have been caused by global climate change. But the global climate has now been so extensively impacted by the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases that weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.”

So there you have it, weather is climate. In this construct, climate change is completely non-falsifible.

The California drought is blamed on climate change, even though, as the New York Times report noted, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier in the winter, when the state gets the bulk of its precipitation.”